Tank Stance Redesign

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I don't see anything wrong with forcing tanks into tank stance at least sometimes. Making it enmity based doesn't mean it's completely predictable either, as enmity will vary depending on the group. Having to balance damage output with tank responsibilities sounds like a perfectly fine concept for a tanking role to me. If the game ends up in a state where tanking is just a side effect of certain jobs doing their DPS rotation, that's a complete failure to design a tank role.

Enmity is static though. It doesn't matter if I generate 1,000 points or 5,000. So long as I am first, I have sufficiently done my job. Therefore, I cannot optimize it. Mitigation falls into the same issue. If I can survive with Sentinel, the extra mitigation from Shield Oath is utterly useless. There is never a scenario where you need more mitigation unless it's free. This is why Tenacity has largely been ignored despite being the pseudo-tank stat. If stacked you gain an extra 5% mitigation, but when nothing remotely comes close to requiring said mitigation, it's entirely wasted. Hence why people focus on damage.

For example sake, let's use Suzaku EX and apply a rigid Tank Stance requirement. Following her phase transition, I will have an easy enmity lead and can survive Phantom Flurry with Vengeance and Raw. I've achieved my whole as a tank. There is literally nothing else I could or should do in regards to enmity and mitigation. Therefore, if I were arbitrarily forced to sit in Defiance until the swap, my damage is simply being nerfed into the ground for no reason. I'm not being rewarded with more compelling gameplay, which would come in the form of consistent damage and/or struggles with enmity. I'm merely sitting around, waiting for Suzaku to do her tank buster. This is neither fun nor interesting because I can't optimize. Nothing I do will improve the situation. I can't better mitigate her tank buster nor is generating even more enmity necessary. My role, as a tank, is done.

You may say, "Well now you can focus on damage!" Except my damage has been artificially gimped to the point of being irrelevant.

While you may prefer these sorts of restrictions to ensure a more genuine tank experience, I guarantee people will quit in droves, thus defeating the whole purpose. It may feel more "tank-y" but that hardly matters when no one's playing it.

[whiskeybravo]

It seems ridiculous to me that there is even an argument about whether tanks should be required to do tank things. Of course they should! They're tanks!

At the end of the day, what happens in the scenario "threat" becomes the main mechanic of tanking? Literally nothing changes except we've taken a hit to our damage output in the process. Oh, now I do a butcher's block instead of a storms path. Distinction without a difference.

I'd prefer a situation where tank stance is required due to high damage intake opposed to just forcing it on tanks because we are supposed to do "tank things"

While you may prefer these sorts of restrictions to ensure a more genuine tank experience, I guarantee people will quit in droves, thus defeating the whole purpose. It may feel more "tank-y" but that hardly matters when no one's playing it.

Key point.

[PangTong]

Enmity is static though. It doesn't matter if I generate 1,000 points or 5,000. So long as I am first, I have sufficiently done my job. Therefore, I cannot optimize it.

Which is why it would require changes to enmity mechanics to make it worth bothering. For starters it shouldn't be possible for tanks to generate enough enmity to last the entire fight in the first few GCDs, even with tank stance. There should come a point where it's more worthwhile to switch into DPS stance, but still have to go back to tank stance later to maintain enmity. Even if enmity mechanics were to remain in a state where enmity can simply build indefinitely and thus it's possible to accumulate as much as necessary at any point in the fight, if it took say, a full minute's worth of tank stance to get that enmity (instead of a few seconds like it does now), it's not going to be optimal to just get all that at the start of the fight because the whole time you're building enmity you'd be sitting on your damage cooldowns like Inner Release (or else have to concede to using them in tank stance).

But a better solution would be to refine enmity itself such that it's not even possible to just generate all required enmity in one go and then sit on it for the whole fight. This could come in various forms, like a cap on the amount of enmity that can be generated in a given timeframe, or a diversion-like decay effect on tank enmity when they are not in tank stance. Or it could be in the form of boss mechanics, e.g. the boss could use an ability that suddenly reduces the MT's enmity, or raises the enmity of the rest of the party.

Those sorts of changes would be needed to make tank stance compelling. But I maintain that it's worth doing, again, because tanks should not be DPS jobs with a blue icon. The "fun" argument doesn't sway me. Having to tank actively, to balance tank responsibilities with damage output, would be more fun for me. Healers have to do this, but because tanks have been spoiled for so long by the ability to offload their responsibilities on their party members, they now think tanks are meant to be DPS jobs in heavy armour. If tank gameplay is to improve and become meaningfully distinct, then eschewing this obsession with personal damage is going to have to be part of it. Tanking should not just be a side effect of optimizing damage, it should be something you have to deliberately give attention to doing.

Mitigation is an entirely different beast altogether. It's frankly something of a wash, as to change the game's design such that mitigation was an active part of tanking (beyond just popping cooldowns for tankbusters) would require significant revisions to both the design of tanks, healers, bosses, and probably the battle system in general. Basically, it's not going to happen. But this isn't an excuse to just delete tank stance. It means that tank stance and tanking in general needs to be rethought a bit to make it a proper and necessary part of the tank toolkit. That's where the whole enmity thing comes in.

(One scenario I could think of where tank stance could be made semi-useful for its mitigation properties without just doing "sit in tank stance the whole fight" is to have boss mechanics where the boss temporarily buffs its damage for say 30-60 seconds to the point where tank stance becomes strongly desirable for survival. Essentially just sustained periods of high incoming damage where a cooldown isn't enough to catch it all, and cooldowns would be needed for tankbusters anyway. But while this does give an incentive for tank stance it's not especially interesting since it's mainly just "set and forget" at predictable points of a fight, instead of trying to determine when it is and isn't safe to leave based on group enmity.)

[Izsha]

Which is why it would require changes to enmity mechanics to make it worth bothering. For starters it shouldn't be possible for tanks to generate enough enmity to last the entire fight in the first few GCDs, even with tank stance. There should come a point where it's more worthwhile to switch into DPS stance, but still have to go back to tank stance later to maintain enmity. Even if enmity mechanics were to remain in a state where enmity can simply build indefinitely and thus it's possible to accumulate as much as necessary at any point in the fight, if it took say, a full minute's worth of tank stance to get that enmity (instead of a few seconds like it does now), it's not going to be optimal to just get all that at the start of the fight because the whole time you're building enmity you'd be sitting on your damage cooldowns like Inner Release (or else have to concede to using them in tank stance).

But a better solution would be to refine enmity itself such that it's not even possible to just generate all required enmity in one go and then sit on it for the whole fight. This could come in various forms, like a cap on the amount of enmity that can be generated in a given timeframe, or a diversion-like decay effect on tank enmity when they are not in tank stance. Or it could be in the form of boss mechanics, e.g. the boss could use an ability that suddenly reduces the MT's enmity, or raises the enmity of the rest of the party.

Those sorts of changes would be needed to make tank stance compelling. But I maintain that it's worth doing, again, because tanks should not be DPS jobs with a blue icon. The "fun" argument doesn't sway me. Having to tank actively, to balance tank responsibilities with damage output, would be more fun for me. Healers have to do this, but because tanks have been spoiled for so long by the ability to offload their responsibilities on their party members, they now think tanks are meant to be DPS jobs in heavy armour. If tank gameplay is to improve and become meaningfully distinct, then eschewing this obsession with personal damage is going to have to be part of it. Tanking should not just be a side effect of optimizing damage, it should be something you have to deliberately give attention to doing.

Mitigation is an entirely different beast altogether. It's frankly something of a wash, as to change the game's design such that mitigation was an active part of tanking (beyond just popping cooldowns for tankbusters) would require significant revisions to both the design of tanks, healers, bosses, and probably the battle system in general. Basically, it's not going to happen. But this isn't an excuse to just delete tank stance. It means that tank stance and tanking in general needs to be rethought a bit to make it a proper and necessary part of the tank toolkit. That's where the whole enmity thing comes in.

(One scenario I could think of where tank stance could be made semi-useful for its mitigation properties without just doing "sit in tank stance the whole fight" is to have boss mechanics where the boss temporarily buffs its damage for say 30-60 seconds to the point where tank stance becomes strongly desirable for survival. Essentially just sustained periods of high incoming damage where a cooldown isn't enough to catch it all, and cooldowns would be needed for tankbusters anyway. But while this does give an incentive for tank stance it's not especially interesting since it's mainly just "set and forget" at predictable points of a fight, instead of trying to determine when it is and isn't safe to leave based on group enmity.)

The fun argument may not interest you, but history says other people sure do. The games where tanks are turtles and have little input to DPS have very few tanks. FFXIV has shorter cue times AND actually requires more tanks. Other games have larger parties of 5/6/10 etc for each 1 tank. FFXIV requires 25% of all players to cue up as a tank, far higher than the majority of MMOs, and has shorter cues for common/relivant activities than those games. 14 is doing something right to attract and maintain people to the tanking role. On the other hand, DPS jobs are far and away the most common played job in every MMO ever. Period. The more a job becomes focused on DPS, the more people will play it. Even the perception of lower DPS hurts play rates of any given job.

Bottom line is being a 'blue dps' is one of the reasons so many people play tanks. Obviously there are still many folks who are in love with the turtle tank fantasy, but unfortunately for those players, turtle love is the minority.

In addition your suggestion to make enmity a more complex/engaging system flies in the face of SE's development model. They have been actively simplifying every job. Culling all the dot tracking. Removing cleric stance as a skill testing ability. Simplifying every rotation. Reducing TP/MP management to be less punishing. Making buff timers more forgiving. I mean look at meme cleave war and 1 combo wonder drk with 1 ogcd to spam. Shirk. They want these roles to be accessible for virtually any player to play at a reasonable baseline functionality. Making other aspects of tanking (enmity, mitigation) more complex and punishing is not where this game is going to go when they have been doing the exact opposite for clearly stated reasons.

SE has taken a stance of accessability which rules out elaborate new punishing tank systems, and the less DPS more turtle fans are in the minority of players. The tank you describe isnt in the cards.

[Yasminou]

But a better solution would be to refine enmity itself such that it's not even possible to just generate all required enmity in one go and then sit on it for the whole fight. This could come in various forms, like a cap on the amount of enmity that can be generated in a given timeframe, or a diversion-like decay effect on tank enmity when they are not in tank stance. Or it could be in the form of boss mechanics, e.g. the boss could use an ability that suddenly reduces the MT's enmity, or raises the enmity of the rest of the party.

Didn't FFXI have the enmity decrease when taking hits? Maybe having a similar system could do the trick without having to add an enmity-decrease mechanic on all the previous bosses.

[Jandor]

Didn't FFXI have the enmity decrease when taking hits? Maybe having a similar system could do the trick without having to add an enmity-decrease mechanic on all the previous bosses.

I believe we have (or had) that here, it's just the decrease is very negligible.

[Deathgiver]

I believe we have (or had) that here, it's just the decrease is very negligible.

has never been in xiv, not in 1.0 not in any of the arr expacs

[Jandor]

has never been in xiv, not in 1.0 not in any of the arr expacs

Hah! Fair enough, the more you know I guess.

At least the incorrect information was beneficial to me, I remember way back when I used to use tank cooldowns to help try and keep packs of mobs on me. Synced players in great gear ripping mobs off newbie tank Jandor was a real kick in the confidence.

Actually, one thing I definitely would change about tank stance is when players get it. Level 15 for tank stance, level 30 for DPS stance.
It really gives the wrong impression to new tanks at the moment, it can be difficult to keep aggro at low levels, but it also doesn't really matter. Totally the opposite of later game where it becomes trivially easy but much more important to do. Tank stance right from dungeon 1 onwards would help I think.

[whiskeybravo]

But I maintain that it's worth doing, again, because tanks should not be DPS jobs with a blue icon. The "fun" argument doesn't sway me. Having to tank actively, to balance tank responsibilities with damage output, would be more fun for me.

I really hope this character is an alt for you. Otherwise I'm looking at this as meaningless drivel from a non-tank main who doesn't even participate in raiding content. Sorry. This argument about tank stance has been going on for years, it's all simply a matter of opinion.

Tanking should be fun for the majority of players so that we have plenty of tanks actually playing the game. Yes, a more "interactive" method of tanking could be more fun/engaging for some of us, but not all of us (and certainly nowhere even near a majority) desire this level of ultra micromanagement from any job - much less tanking.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Those sorts of changes would be needed to make tank stance compelling. But I maintain that it's worth doing, again, because tanks should not be DPS jobs with a blue icon. The "fun" argument doesn't sway me. Having to tank actively, to balance tank responsibilities with damage output, would be more fun for me. Healers have to do this, but because tanks have been spoiled for so long by the ability to offload their responsibilities on their party members, they now think tanks are meant to be DPS jobs in heavy armour. If tank gameplay is to improve and become meaningfully distinct, then eschewing this obsession with personal damage is going to have to be part of it. Tanking should not just be a side effect of optimizing damage, it should be something you have to deliberately give attention to doing.

Fun for you, yes. Like I said in my preceding post, if no one else likes it... the idea fails. That isn't to say they couldn't do more with enmity. You simply cannot approach is from a forced perspective. If they want people to utilize Tank Stance more, it has to come from a player incentivized shift. Unfortunately, enmity can never really be a focal point for tanks because it's static. Healers can optimize healing through well time HoT usage and gradually limiting their GCD heals with experience; DPS simply perfect their damage contribution. What do tanks have in your proposal? As we've established, enmity is set; you're either first or someone's about to die. So we can't optimize that. Mitigation doesn't matter beyond the threshold needed to survive. All that leaves is damage hence why tanks focus on it.

You say increasing the outgoing damage would require a significant revision of the battle system. Then if the devs want us to give a damn about Tank Stance, they have work to do. The concept of having to constantly generate enmity throughout the fight, plus deal with consistently high outgoing damage could be quite exhilarating. Such a system now demands tanks have to think about when to rotate their stances, thus giving them optimization similar to healers. You essentially have to work for your damage. That said, I'd still reduce the penalty. 25% is simply far too high to ever justify. Regardless, you can't accomplish and of this without a design philosophy change. The devs either need to stop coddling with pitiful outgoing damage and hilariously overpowered heals, or accept Tank Stance is simply we use on the first pull of a new tier and typically forget about unless things go horribly wrong or it's Ultimate.